The basic work for “preparedness” is in building the bulwarks of physical strength and endurance.
The study of life is of most vital interest. The enjoyment and maintenance of life is inbred. It is intuitive. The infant’s first instinct is the preservation of life; almost immediately he seeks for nourishment.
His body is an ever awakening wonder to him. He begins his education by testing his lungs, by studying his hands, his legs, and his flesh.
The human race spends more time in providing nourishment for the body than in any other line of activity. Yet we are wasteful; we have not studied to make the food yield its greatest nourishment and the body its greatest efficiency.
Unless the system is thoroughly nourished we miss much of the physical satisfaction of life; we miss the joys of mental development, the inspiration of soul, the sense of growth, of freedom, of expansion, and the self-satisfaction of accomplishing. The satisfaction resulting from greatest usefulness and the enjoyment of the results of usefulness, the greatest blessings and the largest measure of life come only to those whose nutriment is proper in quantity and quality, taken properly as to time, and is thoroughly assimilated, because both body and brain are thereby enabled to develop most fully.
The enjoyment of vibrant life, of bodily efficiency, is far beyond the fancied joys of the intemperate or the ascetic.
That one may thoroughly enjoy life in the freedom which comes from perfect activity of bodily functions, it is necessary that proper habits be formed, then the energy of thought is not constantly engaged in deciding what is best. Habit calls for no conscious expenditure of energy.
Nutrition is a broad subject. It means not only that the foods be supplied which contain elements required to rebuild body substance and to create heat and energy, but it embraces, also, the ability of the body to appropriate the foods to its needs.
The study of nutrition in its full sense, therefore, must embrace not only foods, but anatomy and physiology (particularly of the digestive system). A knowledge of chemistry is also necessary that we may know the changes foods undergo in being converted into tissue, heat, and energy.[1] This science is known as Dietetics.
Scientific research along the lines of electricity, psychology, metaphysics, medicine, and art has been tenaciously pursued for centuries; yet scientific study of the natural means of keeping the body in health, that the individual may be in physical, mental, and moral condition to enjoy and to profit by researches made in other lines, has been neglected.